


Parenthood is Hard

by SneakyHufflepuff



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Action, Adoption, BAMF Clint Barton, Clint is a mama bear, Evil people being evil, Gen, Kidfic, Swearing, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-28
Updated: 2013-01-28
Packaged: 2017-11-27 05:50:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/658645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SneakyHufflepuff/pseuds/SneakyHufflepuff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint defends his child and his home.<br/> <br/><i>A thump from outside his house was the first thing that told Clint something was wrong. He woke abruptly in the chair he had fallen asleep in, the book he had been reading to his daughter still in his hand.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Parenthood is Hard

_S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier: somewhere over the Pacific Ocean_

"The client list is there, but they know we’re coming. It's a trap," Natasha told Fury tiredly, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. She had spent thirty long hours interpreting and analyzing the latest intelligence from an agent implanted deep in the Ten Rings.

"I thought as much. Still, we can't pass up the opportunity to take the client list. I'll send you in, and call Stark and Rogers as back-up. We’ll take their trap and blow it to pieces," Fury said.

Natasha stiffened in her seat. "Are you sure this is worth a partial Avengers mobilization?"

Fury frowned at her question, but relented. Despite the rumors industrially circulated among newbie agents, her boss was willing to entertain objections to his orders. "Yes. The Ten Rings needs to know we won't stand for their shit after the last year."

Natasha considered his words. "True. I'm going in as the Countess?" It was less of a question and more of a statement.

"Yes. Meeting at oh eight hundred. Get some sleep." Fury said. "Nice work, Agent Romanoff."

Natasha nodded acquiescence. Her body felt heavy and her mind felt dull; she could definitely use the three hours of sleep. She decided to crash at her room on the Helicarrier, dismissing the pang of guilt she felt about not being home for the past forty-eight hours. After this mission she’d make it up to Clint and Zoe.

Stark showed up at 0815 hours, despite being told the meeting was at 0715.

"I'd say I'm sorry for being an hour late, but..." Tony shrugged, interrupting Fury’s briefing.

"We didn't need you anyway, Stark," Natasha said. "Long story short, you're my back-up. Take-off is in fifteen minutes. We'll brief you on the way.”

"Romanoff and Rogers, good luck. Stark, don't die." Fury strode from room, coat billowing behind him.

"That man really does love his dramatic exits." Tony declined to be offended and pulled an energy bar out of a compartment in his suit. "So it's just us then? Where's your boyfriend, Romanoff?" Stark asked.

"Who?" Natasha responded.

"Legolas." At Natasha's blank look, he continued. "You know, Hawkeye."

"He retired," Natasha said.

"I'm sorry to hear that," said Steve. "He was handy to have in a fight."

"A second Hawkeye is completing her training. She will be joining the Avengers shortly," Natasha replied.

Steve smiled. "I'm glad we're getting a new member of the team. Without Thor it feels like the Avengers are always a person down."

 

_Redacted, Connecticut_

A thump from outside his house was the first thing that told Clint something was wrong. He woke abruptly in the chair he had fallen asleep in, the book he had been reading to his daughter still in his hand. The hushed silence, free of animal noises, confirmed it. He didn't pull the curtains aside to look outside the window. He knew what he'd see: a quiet suburban street with dangerous men skulking in the shadows. He had no desire to give them a neat target framed by a window and the light inside.

"Zoe, baby," he said to the girl sleeping in his lap, gently shaking her awake. The girl, all of six years old, looked back up at him. She bore no physical resemblance to him, her light brown skin and frizzy brown hair overflowing over her purple cupcake pyjamas contrasting with Clint’s pale pink skin and short spiky hair.

"Daddy?" she answered sleepily, bright eyes heavy with tiredness. "Is Mommy home?"

"No, sweetie. We're gonna go play Safe Room." Clint had already gathered her in his arms and was padding quickly down the stairs, alert for any movement. His long-sleeved grey shirt and beaten-up jeans helped him fade into the blue walls of his house.

Zoe rolled her eyes in a way that looked so much like her mother that only the seriousness of the situation kept Clint from laughing. "Okay. But I know it's not really a game."

"That's because you're so smart." He moved to the kitchen counter and pressed a button on the stove. In the back of the kitchen cupboard, a shelf swung away to reveal a hidden room. "Now I need you to stay safe, sweetie. Don't come out no matter what you hear." The cupboard was constructed to be soundproof, but it was better to be safe than sorry. He helped Zoe climb into the cupboard, checking to make sure the vents bringing air in and out were clear. She was small for her age and fit easily. He closed the door behind her and the cupboard shelves slid back into place, hiding the secret room like it had never been there.

A crash of glass came from upstairs. He had run out of time.

 

_S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier: somewhere over Nevada_

The mission had gone off without a hitch. Natasha had already sent the information to Fury, and was looking forward to returning home, seeing her family and running a warm bath.

"Agent Romanoff, a word." Fury took Natasha aside on her way to the debriefing room. "Twenty minutes ago Barton activated his emergency beacon. We have a team en route that will be there in thirty."

Natasha sucked in air, her heart pounding. "A fifty minute response time?" she demanded, stomach churning with a mixture of fear and anger.

"We had all our resources focused on the Ten Rings issue. I'm sorry."

Natasha spun on her heel and grabbed Tony by the arm of his suit. "Clint's in trouble. How do you feel about giving me a ride to Connecticut?"

One look at her face had the flirtatious reply drying up in his throat. “Sure. Let’s go.”

"I'll get Captain Danvers and follow in the Quinjet," Steve said. "And I'll call Dr. Banner."

Natasha had already dragged Tony out the door.

 

_Redacted, Connecticut_

Clint turned the handle on the cupboard, exhaling in relief as he heard the click that would send the distress signal to S.H.I.E.L.D. and to Natasha. He pulled his bow and standard arrows from their place behind the fridge, swinging his quiver onto his back, vaulting over the counter and heading towards the fuse box in the basement. He slid down the bannister, avoiding the rickety stairs. Worry churned in his stomach, unlike anything he’d ever felt before on a mission. He pushed it down. Zoe was relying on him to be at the top of his game.

The fuse box was under the stairs, next to a small quiver of special arrows. Clint immediately cut the power, turning off all the lights in the house. While he did not relish the thought of fighting in close quarters against an unknown force, he did have a few tricks up his sleeve to make them pay for coming into his home. If only he had more than a minute’s warning. If only he had Natasha. If only he had his old fancy S.H.I.E.L.D. quiver. But he couldn’t waste his time on if-onlys. He exchanged two standard arrows in his quiver for a smoke bomb and one with an explosive tip, feeling the weight of the arrows and the pattern of the fletching to determine which was which.

His eyes adjusted to the near blackness as he hid under the basement stairs. He counted the number of unfamiliar noises echoing through his home turf. The crush of glass, a heavy tread on a stair, the muffled cry of pain as a shin met with a table placed too close to a door. Breathing in and out to cool his nerves, he waited. The door above him opened. Clint saw through a gap in the stairs above that the intruders had opted for night-vision goggles over torches. Good. Closing his eyes, he flicked a switch he had installed when they had first bought the place. Light flooded the basement, along with every room in the house. The men screamed as the light seared their corneas. Clint darted up the stairs, barely slowing to cut the two men's throats with the knife hidden in the bottom of his quiver.

The basement led to the kitchen. Two men there had ripped their goggles off their faces and were rubbing their eyes. Amateurs. Arrows sprouted from their chests before they had time to register his presence. Clint moved through the living room, the downstairs bathroom and the hallway: all clear. The stairs to the second floor began to creak. Clint ran across the floor like a predator, silent and strong, until his back was against the wall dividing the stairs from the kitchen. As the first man hit the bottom step Clint swung around and slit his throat, darting backwards quickly as the two other men on the stairs opened fire with silenced pistols. Bullets hit the painting on the wall in front of the men, shattering the glass and sending the painting crashing to the ground. Clint winced. Natasha was going to kill him; she had stolen that painting in her first non-Red Room job and it held special memories, not to mention the fact it was a genuine something or other.

Clint ducked behind the kitchen counter to let the men waste ammunition shooting his wall. The cupboard Zoe hid in was bulletproof, but Clint prefered to take the battle upstairs. If there were only a few more men, and they were all at this caliber, he might have a chance of ending this battle victorious, and even alive.

Clint shot the smoke bomb arrow, hitting one of the men in his foot and pinning him to the bottom stair. He ducked back behind the counter as the bomb exploded, its payload too big for the confined area of the stairway. Smoke spread through the house, obscuring Clint’s vision. But also, Clint thought with a vicious grin, the vision of his opponents. Relying on his memory, Clint bypassed the man stuck to the stair, knife flashing out twice to kill him and the other intruder with little more than a gurgle from each. Still in the edges of the smoke cloud, Clint reached the top of the stairs.

Four men waited for him at the entrance to the master bedroom. Fuck. He’d hoped that he’d thinned their numbers more than that. His explosive arrow embedded into the chest of the man in the center of the group, turning the man into red mist and making mincemeat of a second. Clint was already backflipping down the stairs as the crackling heat from the explosion washed over him, back into swirls of smoke that shielded him from sight. Bullets followed him, one grazing his left thigh. 

Blood trickling down his thigh, Clint moved to the living room just as the front door fell forward. A wave of heavily armed men entered his house, outlines hazy from the smoke. The two men from upstairs were thundering down the stairs after him. He was surrounded. Never one to quit, Clint let two arrows fly before a bullet slammed into his shoulder, knocking him through the glass coffee table face-first. Pain exploded through every limb as the glass cut through cotton and denim to mark his skin. That pain was secondary to the knowledge he’d failed Zoe.

Before Clint hit the ground the first arrow flew past the first man, cutting his throat and hitting a second man in the back of the neck. As Clint rolled with the impact of the fall, the second arrow—a rushed shot—hit a third man in the knee. Finding his feet, Clint threw his knife at a fourth man. Then he held his hands in the air, glass smeared red falling from his arms, and waited.

Clint expected his life to flash before his eyes, instead the butt of a rifle crashed into his head. He hit the floor, still conscious. Rough hands flipped him onto his stomach and tied his hands behind his back. Craning his neck from the floor, he saw high heels step their way carefully through the debris of his previously clean and organized living room.

"Well, well, little hawk. I've heard so much about you." A middle-aged woman crouched in front of him, her black hair pulled back into a ponytail, her brown eyes regarding Clint thoughtfully. "A bowman that never misses. No wonder you retired. Anything that goes wrong with your body puts your fearsome reputation at risk. For instance," she reached behind him to grab his index finger in one delicate hand. "This." She broke his finger, the snap echoing around the room. Clint clenched his jaw. "That's for my people that you killed. Now tell me where your daughter is, and I won't break another. "

Clint grinned. "Sleepover."

The woman grinned back and dislocated his thumb. "Try again."

"Sleepover," Clint spat defiantly. Blood from the bullet wound in his thigh and the small cuts that littered his body ran down his skin and ruined clothing and into his lush green rug. The rug that he and Natasha had picked out at an estate sale three houses down the street. He focused on the memory of that day, Natasha laughing with Zoe on her hip.

Another snap echoed through his body. His middle finger. "Very well then. We only need you, after all. The Widow's shown what she'll do to get you back." The woman slipped his gold wedding ring off his ring finger. "Last chance."

"Go to hell," Clint bit out, using the toe of his foot to brush the the glass shards at his feet into a pattern. Snap. A flash of pain and his ring finger hung at an odd angle. He would need to set it soon if he didn't want it to heal crooked. He finished the pattern with the glass as best he could, hand a mass of pain and head still throbbing from the earlier blow.

"And it would be a shame not to collect the set," the woman continued, a sadistic gleam in her eye. Snap. His pinky finger became as mangled as the other four. The men behind him grabbed his legs and began to drag him to the door. He struggled, but was unable to get any leverage.

"Leaving a message for your wife? Cute." His hope of getting a message to Natasha vanished as the black-haired woman messed up the pattern and ground the glass Clint had arranged into dust beneath her feet. “Don’t worry. We’ll leave one of our own.” She turned her back to Clint as he was dragged away and spoke to two of her henchmen, both hard-eyed and sporting buzzcuts. "Find the girl. We saw her enter the house. She’s still here." Clint felt a syringe penetrate the side of his neck and the world went dark. _Zoe, stay hidden, baby. Stay safe._

 

_Redacted, Connecticut. Twenty minutes later._

Natasha winced as Tony hit the ground just a little too hard, leaving muddy boot-prints in the damp soil of her yard. The dawn light suffused the dew covered grass, the white picket fence and the cream house with an otherworldly air. The path was spotless, but her flowers had been crushed by many clumsy feet prior to her arrival, all the evidence she needed that other people had beaten them here. The stillness of the houses around her told her whatever had happened was over. Still she ran inside her house at a sprint, gun in one hand, still dressed in her S.H.I.E.L.D. bodysuit.

"No." The word escaped from her mouth of its own volition as she saw two bodies in the kitchen, each with an arrow embedded in his chest. The floor was sticky with the blood that pooled from their bodies. "No. No, no, no." The word became a chant as she ran into the living room. The glass coffee table was smashed, blood half-dried on shards of glass and on the metal frame, but no body at its center. Three bodies, each dressed in BDUs, lay sprawled around the room. One with a knife in his eye, one with his throat cut and one with an arrow in the back of his neck. An arrow had been left inside a vase on the elegant wooden side table, inside the spray of flowers Clint and Zoe had picked for her. A gold ring attached a note to the arrow shaft. Natasha stood frozen at the door, eyes tracing the path of a fight that had ended thirty minutes before.

Tony clanked over to the paper, slipping it off the arrow and unrolling it. "Widow. We have your husband. Stay out of our way or he dies," Tony read, voice tight with anger. “The Ten Rings are their usual charming selves, I see.”

Natasha’s eyes flicked to the kitchen cupboards, but she stopped herself from running to them. For now, she wasn’t a mother who needed to see her child like she needed to breathe. She was an agent who needed to do her job. “We need to check the rest of the house,” Black Widow said, attempting to keep her voice businesslike. “You check the basement, I’ll check the upstairs floor.”

Tony followed her instructions without protest, a miracle in and of itself. Natasha walked up the stairs, stepping over more bodies. She recognized Clint’s handiwork, mind already constructing a partial narrative of the fight. Whoever had attacked her family had known that they would need to spend resources to do so, and had done so unflinchingly.

Zoe’s bedroom was untouched by blood, but the bed was half overturned and the chest of toys strewn around the floor, speaking to Black Widow of a different kind of violence: a search, and frustration taken out on material possessions once the search proved fruitless.

What sounded like the buzzing of a thousand giant bees came from outside. She looked outside Zoe’s bedroom window to see Steve, Bruce and Carol exiting the Quinjet.

“Two more bodies down here,” Tony called up the stairs from the basement.

From behind her, Black Widow heard the wardrobe door slide open. She hit the ground as bullets flew towards where her head had been a second ago. From her position prone on the hardwood floor, she shot a third of the way up the wardrobe and two men fell out, bullet holes in their legs leaking blood. She used her arms to spin on the ground and kick the guns from their hands.

“I’m fine,” she called.

The metal boots stomping up the stairs stopped. “Russian fine, or actually fine?” Iron Man responded from the landing.

“Actually fine. Check out the downstairs.” Iron Man harrumphed, but made his way back down the stairs. On the ground beneath her one man was already bleeding out and mewling in pain. “And don’t worry about the gunshot.” Black Widow shot the man in the head.

She turned the second man, carefully controlled rage in her eyes. She set down her gun and began to bandage his legs with Zoe’s bedroom curtains, jerking hard to cut off the flow of blood. Red began to soak the simple print on the curtains, obscuring the cartoon trains that Zoe had fallen madly in love with on her fourth birthday.

“Thank you,” the man croaked, wide blue eyes surprisingly young and innocent for a hired mercenary.

“Don’t thank me,” the Black Widow said, her voice cold. “One prisoner up here,” she called, wiping the blood from her hands on the man’s uniform.

She checked the master bedroom quickly but thoroughly. The Black Widow’s job done, she reverted to Natasha Romanoff and rushed down the stairs and into the kitchen. Shaking hands pressed the button by the stove. The shelves swung open, revealing a still form. Natasha’s heart stopped, until she saw the small rise and fall of her chest.

“Zoe!” Natasha said, ignoring everything else.

“Mommy?” Zoe said, jerking awake, eyes wide and frightened. 

“It’s okay, baby, you’re safe now.” Zoe climbed out of the cupboard and threw herself into Natasha’s arms. Natasha held onto her tightly and began to cry in relief.

Tony looked at the girl in Natasha’s arms in shock. “Mommy?” he whispered.

“Where’s Daddy?” Zoe asked, lip quivering.

“The bad people took him.” Natasha wanted to tell Zoe that everything was going to be okay, but she wasn’t going to make promises she couldn’t keep. “We’re going to try to get him back.”

Tony, Steve, Carol and Bruce all stood gaping at her. She snapped back into Black Widow mode.

“We should go back to the Helicarrier. Bring the prisoner. The S.H.I.E.L.D. team will do clean-up and forensic analysis. There’s nothing else here that we need.”

Natasha dozed on the Quinjet flight back to S.H.I.E.L.D., forcing her body to get the sleep it needed. Zoe was asleep in her arms, Natasha's long curly red hair mixed in with Zoe's frizzy dark brown. The other Avengers stood in the Quinjet, watching over them. Zoe stirred briefly in her sleep, waking Natasha instantly. Natasha looked around for reassurance, and seeing her teammates, seemed to find it.

"So when did you adopt Zoe?" Steve asked gently.

“Three years ago. Clint and I decided that we wanted kids after New York.” Natasha looked at Steve; he was genuinely listening, of course. “She was in Baltimore and no one wanted her. She was old enough that her chances of being adopted were dwindling. She was so small, with these big eyes.” Natasha kissed Zoe on the head, as if to reassure herself that Zoe was still there. “We were talking about adopting again.” Tears started to stream from her eyes. “Oh god, this was supposed to end once he retired. We were supposed to be safe.”

"We'll get him back." Steve put his hand on Natasha's shoulder and squeezed.

"We’ll do our best," Natasha responded, voice tight with the effort of suppressing her emotions.

Lightning flickered outside, followed by the roar of thunder. Through the small plane window Natasha could see a red cape fluttering in the distance. She smiled wearily.

**Author's Note:**

> After looking at the gifs implying that Merida is Clint and Natasha’s kid, I couldn’t help but think that if we can go into the fictional past, we can go into the fictional future. For me, Zoe Washburn is totally the woman that would come from the kid Clint and Natasha would raise.


End file.
